luzula: a Luzula pilosa, or hairy wood-rush (Default)
luzula ([personal profile] luzula) wrote in [personal profile] cahn 2021-11-24 10:03 pm (UTC)

Re: Write-up of "The Jacobites", by Daniel Szechi (2019)

And then apparently you get the Stuarts having to make concessions in exile (this I had either not learned, or more likely, forgotten, because I was far more into this for the military history than political or diplomatic history at the time), and then you end up with the Jacobins, whose political philosophy is, "We don't need no stinkin' king!"

I mean, despite the Stuarts making concessions and committing themselves to more radical politics, I don't think the Jacobite ideology transforms into the Jacobin one. More I guess that Ireland was a special case. Here's a paragraph from the book:

As we have seen, Irish Jacobitism had very deep roots in Irish-language culture. And thus it is not surprising to find that as late as the 1760s and 1780s peasant secret societies like the Whiteboys and Rightboys were still associating themselves with Jacobitism.³⁴ Because their attachment to the Stuarts stemmed from an oral, plebeian culture shared by the majority of the population, but separate from the ‘great tradition’ of their patrician counterparts, it was, moreover, naturally resistant to the forces of change, disillusionment and despair that destroyed Jacobitism elsewhere in the British Isles, and consequently may even have lingered into the 1790s.³⁵ Hence the oaths and rhetoric of the Defenders (a plebeian Catholic secret society that succeeded the Rightboys), who were recruited to fight for Ireland’s freedom by republican, Protestant, United Irishmen between 1796 and 1798, still contained references to the Stuarts.³⁶ Ireland’s special brand of sectarian oppression was, nevertheless, clearly already giving rise to enduring patterns of resentment and resistance that would make its social and political development unique within the British Isles. The hidden Ireland’s lingering affection for the Jacobite cause was a symptom rather than a cause of this. Hence the transition from monarchism to republicanism as the guiding light of this secret culture that took place at the end of the eighteenth century may have been relatively easy; both were means to an end – the overthrow of the ruling elite.³⁷

I suppose in England and Scotland people of all classes disaffected with the current government might naturally turn to Jacobitism in the first half of the 18th century. And then Jacobitism gradually faded away...and in the 1790's such people might instead naturally turn to Jacobinism, at least if they're from the lower or middle classes. But it doesn't mean the first evolved into the latter. Also, I guess this means the British elite was more unified in the 1790's and onward, than it was in the first half of the 18th century?

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